Low Frame Rates/Graphic Settings?

[charlottethegiantess]

Hey all!

So i've been trying to figure out what's making SL run on so little frames. i'm running at 20 on average in pretty much every sim. My specs are, gpu AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT, cpu AMD Ryzen 9 3900 12-core processor, 32 Gb ram. I'm using the firestorm viewer 6.3.9

In theory i should be running SL just fine right? but i'm so stumped on the grapthic settings and what would be the best. Ideally i want to be running the highest settings while being smooth. Any tips/advice?

Thanks!

[Chic Aeon]

Well two things come to mind for sure.  You most likely REALLY don't want to run at the "highest" setting even if you can. The highest setting changes your LODs to LOD3 which is going to be VERY hard on your system in this age of heavy mesh. Most folks I know use LOD2 and if you can't see something at LOD2 you most likely "shouldn't" be buying it :D.  

You also most likely don't want your draw distance at more than half a sim except when you REALLY need to see far away. Your viewer has to load way too much that way. 

 

This is my current settings on a 4 or 5 year old computer

 

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz (3298.09 MHz)
Memory: 16286 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 19042.867)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 980/PCIe/SSE2

 

I am currently getting 90fps on my store sim and around 40 on my "foo foo" tons of clutter house rental sim

 

 

PS. I have a new computer coming tomorrow with a 3070 card.  I have no plans on changing my settings :D.

Edited April 1, 2021 by Chic Aeon
adding info

[Jenna Huntsman]

8 hours ago, charlottethegiantess said:

Hey all!

So i've been trying to figure out what's making SL run on so little frames. i'm running at 20 on average in pretty much every sim. My specs are, gpu AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT, cpu AMD Ryzen 9 3900 12-core processor, 32 Gb ram. I'm using the firestorm viewer 6.3.9

In theory i should be running SL just fine right? but i'm so stumped on the grapthic settings and what would be the best. Ideally i want to be running the highest settings while being smooth. Any tips/advice?

Thanks!

AMD GPU -- same as mine actually -- DO NOT USE FIRESTORM!!!!

Firestorm (and the LL viewer for that matter) don't like AMD gpus - fortunately other TPVs have better optimization for AMD.

Check out CoolVL (my current daily viewer, avg. FPS is around 45 with EEP enabled), or Alchemy (my previous daily, current *release* version does not support EEP)

Edit:

R.e. Antivirus whitelisting, it *may* help, but if your primary drive is an SSD it'll make next to no difference with your specs.
R.e. LOD settings, *never* turn this up above 2. Really, it shouldn't even be at 2, as the LL default & recommended is 1.2, and any content which breaks as a result was not made correctly in the first place. Seriously, look at the technical talk from some of the other threads, but there's a lot of free FPS on the table if people turn down their LOD distance.

If you want to continue using Firestorm with the best possible performance, you may wish to consider switching to Linux as the OpenGL support on AMD is vastly superior than it is on Windows.

Edited April 2, 2021 by Jenna Huntsman
Extra info.

[Aishagain]

@charlottethegiantess  You are probably already doing this but make sure that the viewer, its cache and the settings files realted to it are all excluded from your antivirus...for Firestorm see this, the same applies to all viewers, just the names will change.

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting.

I use an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X CPU but an NVidia GTX1660Ti GPU and I can run full ultra mostly except in crowded sims where I need to turn off shadows.  While I hear Chic say LOD2 is best, I find I need LOD3 to see mesh bodies correctly, though any higher than 3.5 comes with a real hit to FPS and a strong chance of periodic cache texture corruption.

In SL CPU speed is often the limiting factor if you have a reasonably good GPU.  Sadly AMD are still somewhat inferior to NVidia when it comes to OpenGL applications like SL (though AMD are much better  "bang per buck" for most applications).

ETA: Lyssa's point regarding the listing of the viewer with the GPU settings is important to optimize performance with AMD systems.

Edited April 2, 2021 by Aishagain
Additional information

[Lyssa Greymoon]

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Edited April 2, 2021 by Lyssa Greymoon

[charlottethegiantess]

13 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Well two things come to mind for sure.  You most likely REALLY don't want to run at the "highest" setting even if you can. The highest setting changes your LODs to LOD3 which is going to be VERY hard on your system in this age of heavy mesh. Most folks I know use LOD2 and if you can't see something at LOD2 you most likely "shouldn't" be buying it :D.  

You also most likely don't want your draw distance at more than half a sim except when you REALLY need to see far away. Your viewer has to load way too much that way. 

 

This is my current settings on a 4 or 5 year old computer

 

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz (3298.09 MHz)
Memory: 16286 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 19042.867)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 980/PCIe/SSE2

 

I am currently getting 90fps on my store sim and around 40 on my "foo foo" tons of clutter house rental sim

 

 

PS. I have a new computer coming tomorrow with a 3070 card.  I have no plans on changing my settings :D.

So i tried doing this but i'm still getting 20 ish frames a second. I tried the Alchemy viewer as well on the same exact settings but it's around 30? I'm honestly quite stummed why it isn't running better. i've got the network speed at 1500 as well.

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, charlottethegiantess said:

So i tried doing this but i'm still getting 20 ish frames a second. I tried the Alchemy viewer as well on the same exact settings but it's around 30? I'm honestly quite stumped why it isn't running better. i've got the network speed at 1500 as well.

Well since you are in a non-EEP viewer I guess it must be the AMD card.   I thought of that but also thought that The Lab has been playing nicer with AMD graphics.  Well nicer is relative I guess. There is a reason why so many of us "now" use Nvidia.   I had a glorious AMD card over a decade ago. Didn't play well with SL at all. Last time I had one.   

 

Try coming over to my free art gallery. I get 72 when things finish loading.  Very "light" mesh so if you are still getting 20 I am guessing it is the AMD thing.  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Moon Beach/141/158/2511

Hope it works out OK for you!

 

[Jenna Huntsman]

3 hours ago, charlottethegiantess said:

So i tried doing this but i'm still getting 20 ish frames a second. I tried the Alchemy viewer as well on the same exact settings but it's around 30? I'm honestly quite stummed why it isn't running better. i've got the network speed at 1500 as well.

Post a photo of your graphics settings, there's likely tweaks that can be done there (to reiterate - I've got a similar HW setup to you, so you should definitely get more than 30 fps on avg. - I've attached screenshots of my current settings in CoolVL)

1 hour ago, Chic Aeon said:

Well since you are in a non-EEP viewer I guess it must be the AMD card.   I thought of that but also thought that The Lab has been playing nicer with AMD graphics.  Well nicer is relative I guess. There is a reason why so many of us "now" use Nvidia.   I had a glorious AMD card over a decade ago. Didn't play well with SL at all. Last time I had one.   

 

Try coming over to my free art gallery. I get 72 when things finish loading.  Very "light" mesh so if you are still getting 20 I am guessing it is the AMD thing.  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Moon Beach/141/158/2511

Hope it works out OK for you!

 

It is, to a point. Getting 30 fps with that setup though is not normal! The reason is that AMD's OpenGL plain isn't as good as Nvidia's is on Windows. Nor is that likely to change, as there's no demand for it (in the big picture sense, as the only things using OpenGL these days are emulators). Another reason is that the viewer is single-threaded (so it's always choked, no matter what hardware you've got), a mess of pre-OpenGL 4 code which has to be kept in order to make MacOS work. 

In reality, the only way to solve it is to rebuild the viewer from the ground up with a new renderer, which LL *are* putting work towards, but (as far as I know) it's just research right now.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

17 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

AMD GPU -- same as mine actually -- DO NOT USE FIRESTORM!!!!

😑

-----------------------------------

 

Visiting that art gallery, I get... well, inconsistant... FPS from 30ish to 90. Walking around the area, the average is 40, +/- 5.
2k display, not fullscreen, AMD RX 5700XT, Ryzen 7 3700x, 32 RAM, viewer and cache on seperate SSDs ... that's pretty much usable on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, you cannot troubleshoot on SL.

Anyway... you don't have limited frames or progressive draw distance activated, do?

[Jenna Huntsman]

1 hour ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

😑

-----------------------------------

 

Visiting that art gallery, I get... well, inconsistant... FPS from 30ish to 90. Walking around the area, the average is 40, +/- 5.
2k display, not fullscreen, AMD RX 5700XT, Ryzen 7 3700x, 32 RAM, viewer and cache on seperate SSDs ... that's pretty much usable on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, you cannot troubleshoot on SL.

Anyway... you don't have limited frames or progressive draw distance activated, do?

I should probably rephrase that, but the point stands: On my system (Ryzen 3800X, stock clocks, water cooled, RX6900XT reference, 32GB RAM, 3200Mhz), running Firestorm with the exact same settings as CoolVL nets me (on average) 10FPS less, and the same with Alchemy. Both CV and Alch have some AMD-specific optimizations which help in this regard, which is why I recommend people don't use FS if they are on AMD.

Don't get me wrong, I still have FS installed, as there are a couple of features which I find useful when developing products, but I don't use it as a daily driver because of the performance difference.

[Ansariel Hiller]

1 hour ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

I should probably rephrase that, but the point stands: On my system (Ryzen 3800X, stock clocks, water cooled, RX6900XT reference, 32GB RAM, 3200Mhz), running Firestorm with the exact same settings as CoolVL nets me (on average) 10FPS less, and the same with Alchemy. Both CV and Alch have some AMD-specific optimizations which help in this regard, which is why I recommend people don't use FS if they are on AMD.

Don't get me wrong, I still have FS installed, as there are a couple of features which I find useful when developing products, but I don't use it as a daily driver because of the performance difference.

Sorry to disappoint you, but there are no AMD-specific optimizations.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

11 minutes ago, Ansariel Hiller said:

Sorry to disappoint you, but there are no AMD-specific optimizations.

[citation needed]

[Lillith Hapmouche]

And the opposite claim does not need citation?

[Jenna Huntsman]

34 minutes ago, Ansariel Hiller said:

Sorry to disappoint you, but there are no AMD-specific optimizations.

Without digging too far into the Alchemy sources, here's some of the stuff implemented in CoolVL as of late:

Backported from Alchemy (Rye Mutt's code) "use RGBA16 as screen format when GL version is 4.0 or above" for AMD GPUs. (This bring 10-bit colour support to the SL renderer, AMD specific, does not impact framerate)

Removed ancient/dubious (and now clearly detrimental) fixes for Intel and AMD GPUs OpenGL drivers. Some speed benefits are expected on these platforms as a result.

 

The Alchemy closed beta (Shrewdshepard) may include more optimizations, but without access to the sources it's hard to tell.

 

[anthonytorino]

THat isn't exactly normal, even our third pc ith a ryzen 6 core and 5500 sereis get's higher. But Secondlife is CPU not GPU dependent. Still should be gettign 40-70 fps with dcent draw water reflections, advanced on, shadows off (CPU throttling should be turned OFF and no AMD cool n Q. on or it will lower frames)

On my I9 all except shadows (advanced on) (water reflections on) at 360-400m m draw LOD 4 (really doesn't hit most systems that hard) a setting of 2 is rediculous low, its fine if you want things fadign in detail at a distance and beign a mess. On a I% and higher 3.0 is fine (i9 4.0 isn't even goign to touch it.)  I get 90-125 fps depending on how many others are in the scene. 

 

Shadows on drops into 50's so you need to reduce draw distance. More avatars on screen drops it as well. 

Some reason the ryzen isn't getting what it needs and threads is a viewer issue. Have better control with my IP to push the threads over to 1 primary core efficiently or offload onto multiple. 

GPU's are NOT going to make a big difference, nor will getting a RTX 3080. It is dependent on the CPU. Forcing the Opengl handler also will not affect it because of how outdated the viewers are with OPENGL. 

While some textures can be offloaded to a gpu, it's simply not going to skyrocket your FPS unless using alchemy which actually drops your LOD to 2. 

Linden needs to overhaul the engine. It's the main issue, most CPU's can't use it own features, and GPU's are just not utilized. Shadows are not handled well at all and until they over haul it's not going to improve a whole lot. 

 

Edited April 3, 2021 by anthonytorino

[charlottethegiantess]

This all sounds really confusing to me but it does sound like the issue seems to be with SL itself. I've dropped the screenshots below of my current settings. i've tried multiple viewers like CoolVL and Alchemy but it doesn't have any increase whatsoever.

Thank you all for your help so far! i'd really hope i can solve this 😅

[Jenna Huntsman]

16 hours ago, anthonytorino said:

THat isn't exactly normal, even our third pc ith a ryzen 6 core and 5500 sereis get's higher. But Secondlife is CPU not GPU dependent. Still should be gettign 40-70 fps with dcent draw water reflections, advanced on, shadows off (CPU throttling should be turned OFF and no AMD cool n Q. on or it will lower frames)

On my I9 all except shadows (advanced on) (water reflections on) at 360-400m m draw LOD 4 (really doesn't hit most systems that hard) a setting of 2 is rediculous low, its fine if you want things fadign in detail at a distance and beign a mess. On a I% and higher 3.0 is fine (i9 4.0 isn't even goign to touch it.)  I get 90-125 fps depending on how many others are in the scene. 

 

Shadows on drops into 50's so you need to reduce draw distance. More avatars on screen drops it as well. 

Some reason the ryzen isn't getting what it needs and threads is a viewer issue. Have better control with my IP to push the threads over to 1 primary core efficiently or offload onto multiple. 

GPU's are NOT going to make a big difference, nor will getting a RTX 3080. It is dependent on the CPU. Forcing the Opengl handler also will not affect it because of how outdated the viewers are with OPENGL. 

While some textures can be offloaded to a gpu, it's simply not going to skyrocket your FPS unless using alchemy which actually drops your LOD to 2. 

Linden needs to overhaul the engine. It's the main issue, most CPU's can't use it own features, and GPU's are just not utilized. Shadows are not handled well at all and until they over haul it's not going to improve a whole lot. 

 

Agree with most of this, but the stuff about LOD 4 is bunk - LOD 4 means that the viewer is always loading and rendering the highest complexity mesh possible. Think about that in terms of a a mesh body (I think I read somewhere about Belleza being somewhere around 800,000 tris for the entire body, hands and feet at max LOD), that's going to choke the (albeit very old and unoptimized) renderer and tank your frames. A normal game often places 50,000 tris for character models, and almost every asset has LODs which are used when an object will not be 'in focus', in order to free up time to render more frames overall. If you're playing around with enabling shadows, this only makes the problem worse as the renderer has to process a higher complexity mesh and calculate it's shadow, instead of using a lower LOD for an object, say 50m away from the avatar and calculating the shadows on the LOD.

Switching to an Nvidia card *would* help if you're on Windows as the AMD OpenGL driver isn't great. But also, good luck to anyone trying to find a 3080 in stock, at a non-stupid price. (I'd recommend not trying it unless SL is a major use for your machine, and you'd benefit in other areas from making the switch)

2 hours ago, charlottethegiantess said:

This all sounds really confusing to me but it does sound like the issue seems to be with SL itself. I've dropped the screenshots below of my current settings. i've tried multiple viewers like CoolVL and Alchemy but it doesn't have any increase whatsoever.

Thank you all for your help so far! i'd really hope i can solve this 😅

Disable shadows and your framerate will jump by a considerable amount. Shadows are bound by the CPU, but coupled with the slower OpenGL on AMD they become pretty unusable pretty quickly as the framerate drops through the floor.

In my experience, the only viewer that I can use with shadows enabled and have playable frame rates is Alchemy.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

3 hours ago, charlottethegiantess said:

This all sounds really confusing to me but it does sound like the issue seems to be with SL itself. I've dropped the screenshots below of my current settings.

With your current settings you should get very good frame rates with almost anything. This suggests there is something else wrong with your computer setup. I’d run a malware scan first off, then check the performance monitor in task manager to see if something else is going nuts and eating up your computer’s CPU cycles.

Things you should not have to do with a reasonably modern computer with a high performance GPU:

turn off anisotropic filtering or antialiasing, disable transparent water, use a draw distance < 128M.

You should have streamed VBOs enabled, but disabling it won’t tank your frame rate.

[Solar Legion]

Can't believe I missed the post Jenna quoted above ....

There is no valid reason to have your Draw Distance set that high. None. Ever. No, not even when using a vehicle. No, not even taking snapshots.

There is also no reason to keep your LOD set that high and in fact Firestorm (at the least) is coded to drop the value to that on next log in if you use the Debug menu to set it higher. The only reason that is still an option is to prevent some users griping about it.

As far as getting above 60 to 80 FPS? That's nice. It is also not needed/irrelevant for Second Life. FPS above a point does nothing whatsoever and any "improvement" you claim to see simply does not exist.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

4 hours ago, charlottethegiantess said:

This all sounds really confusing to me...

Yeah, for some reason, technical threads draws in all the folks who like to chatter about what they know, whether it's relevant for the OP or not.

[Ansariel Hiller]

2 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

Agree with most of this, but the stuff about LOD 4 is bunk - LOD 4 means that the viewer is always loading and rendering the highest complexity mesh possible.

Incorrect. A higher LOD only means the distances for the LOD thresholds are increased.

[Jenna Huntsman]

17 hours ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

You should have streamed VBOs enabled, but disabling it won’t tank your frame rate.

In my experience, on AMD hardware this drops the framerate by 2-3 fps on average. Nothing major, but enough that I usually keep it off.

16 hours ago, Ansariel Hiller said:

Incorrect. A higher LOD only means the distances for the LOD thresholds are increased.

True, but if I'm not mistaken LOD 4 loads objects at full resolution up to and beyond 128m away (depending on overall scene complexity), which is completely pointless, even on a 4k screen.

[charlottethegiantess]

18 hours ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

With your current settings you should get very good frame rates with almost anything. This suggests there is something else wrong with your computer setup. I’d run a malware scan first off, then check the performance monitor in task manager to see if something else is going nuts and eating up your computer’s CPU cycles.

Things you should not have to do with a reasonably modern computer with a high performance GPU:

turn off anisotropic filtering or antialiasing, disable transparent water, use a draw distance < 128M.

You should have streamed VBOs enabled, but disabling it won’t tank your frame rate.

So did a maleware scan and nothing popped up 🤷‍♀️

It's also a fairly new computer! Maybe a month or two old now. i've disabled those but still getting like 20 frames in populated areas. 

[Jenna Huntsman]

21 minutes ago, charlottethegiantess said:

So did a maleware scan and nothing popped up 🤷‍♀️

It's also a fairly new computer! Maybe a month or two old now. i've disabled those but still getting like 20 frames in populated areas. 

Out of interest, do you have an LM to aforementioned 'populated area'? Would like to see what kind of FPS I get as I have a similar hardware setup to yourself.

[Rowan Amore]

2 hours ago, charlottethegiantess said:

So did a maleware scan and nothing popped up 🤷‍♀️

It's also a fairly new computer! Maybe a month or two old now. i've disabled those but still getting like 20 frames in populated areas. 

20 fps in a populated place might be all you can hope for.  40-60 people in a club or shopping event is going to negatively impact even the best computer set up.  

How populated are these places are, the type of build, the avatars are all going to effect your fps.  I'll get 50-60 fps on my mainland home yet struggle to get 20 at some clubs.